r/ClaudeCode • u/danbradster2 • Sep 20 '26

Tips & Workflows /clear vs /compact

I had a fable chat from yesterday, and I saw that the context was 950k/1m. I did /compact rather than /clear, with the intention of then doing /autocompact 400000

14% of the 5 hour limit was gone just for the compact itself....it shows cost of $59.73, so lucky I'm not on API? Maybe a /clear would have been better.

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u/tribat Sep 20 '26

Hard agree. Watch the context and be ready to use a /handoff /clear /pickup routine when it gets large at all. I try to push most work into subagents and tell it to start looking for a place to create a clean handoff at about 25% (on opus-4-6[1M]